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Book Reviews

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References
Bion WR (2005). The Tavistock seminars. London: Karnac.
Delourmel C (2010). Presentation lecture on Greens Illusions et desillusions du travail psychanalytique. Read to the Paris Psychoanalytical Society meeting on 16 September 2010.
Freud S (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. SE 23:209253.
Freud S (1937d). Constructions in analysis. SE 23:255269.
Freud S (1940[1938]). An outline of psychoanalysis. SE 23, 139147.
Green A (1984). Le langage dans la psychanalyse. In Green A, Diatkine R, Jabes E, Fain M, and
Fonagy I (eds). Langages. Paris: Belles Lettres.
Green A (1999). The work of the negative, Weller A, translator. London: Free Association Books.
Green A (2002). Idees directrices pour une psychanalyse contemporaine [Key ideas for a
contemporary psychoanalysis]. Paris: PUF.
Green A (2007). Pourquoi les pulsions de destruction ou de mort? [Why drives of destruction or
death?] Paris: Panama.
Green A (2010). Pourquoi les pulsions de destruction ou de mort? [Why drives of destruction or
death?] Paris: Ithaque.
Grossman V (2010) Everything ows. Chandler R, Chandler E, translators. London: Harvill Secker.
Kertesz I (2011). The holocaust as culture: A conversation with Imre Kertesz. Cooper C, translator.
Chicago, IL: U Chicago Press.
Schneider M (2011). Marilyn, the last sessions. Hobson W, translator. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Tragic Knots in Psychoanalysis: New Papers on Psychoanalysis

by Roy Schafer
Karnac, London, 2009; 181 pp; 19.99

Roy Schafers authorial voice distinctive, endlessly striving for conceptual

clarity and a systematic approach is one of the great authentic psychoanalytic voices of our time. His characteristic literary style, his passion and his
precision have been present throughout his writings and Tragic Knots in
Psychoanalysis is no exception. This latest addition to his vast body of work
collects Schafers papers from the past decade or so. The book is organized
into three major parts or sections: On basic concepts, The internal world of
conflict and phantasy, and Changing conceptions of the analytic relationship.
The chapters are edited and organized with novelistic skill into a coherent
whole, supplemented here and there by previously unpublished chapters that
contribute to the project. There is a preface that looks at the work from the
perspective of the history of psychoanalytic ideas, with special attention paid
to the evolution of the authors thinking. The closing chapter of the book is
entitled: You Can Get There From Here. It is a thoughtful intellectual
memoir describing the authors journey in psychoanalysis throughout the
years, and adds an appealing personal coda to the work.
In that personal memoir, Schafer tells us that he sees throughout all his
work two red threads. First is his deliberate investigation of the nature of
interpretation. Second, seen only in retrospect, is a conflict between a powerful wish to accept, master, and if possible enhance received wisdom and
an equally powerful inclination to challenge that heritage and find it wanting (p. 159). In this book, he repeatedly points out this process of refashioning ones self-narrative.
The task of summarizing Schafers complex thought is made easier by his
ability to summarize himself. Here is an example from the preface:
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Psychoanalysis has always been a way of studying human relationships: their origins
in biological, familial and cultural processes, their development and transformations
through the course of life and the needs they fulfill and sacrifices and suffering they
entail in many varied contexts of opportunity, restriction, deprivation and prohibition. Outstanding among the numerous existential issues it has studied closely are
love and hate, trust and suspicion, loyalty and betrayal, nurturance and persecution,
abuse and forgiveness. And it has always [been] faced with the same question that
pervades literature, art and the human sciences: how best to define and differentiate
this array of processes and issues and how to recognize and interpret signs of their
influence and origins.
(p. xiii)

Of particular interest to me are the three chapters in Part I, On basic

concepts. Here, Schafer gives a virtually seamless integration of essential core
concepts in Freudian and post-Freudian thought. The eternal Freudian
fundamentals (conflict, unconscious fantasy, the relation to reality, the analytic process) come alive in Schafers eloquent voice, combining a mastery of
Freud as well as of both the American ego psychological and British
Kleinian traditions with his own distinctive emphasis on agency and action;
narrative and dialogue; and choice, risk, and responsibility.
In Chapter 1, The Reality Principle, Tragic Knots, and the Analytic
Process, the topic of tragic knots is developed at length in relation to what
Schafer calls the expanded and inclusive reality principle. Summarizing the
significance of his books title, he writes:
I chose Tragic Knots for my title to convey at a glance my basic conception of psychoanalysis: that it is a study of unavoidable conflict within and between human
beings, that conflict usually proves to be irreducible simply to two factors, but
rather has many strands that are difficult to disentangle, let alone restore to some
design. Hence, Knots ... Tragic because it acknowledges the centrality of conflict
and compromise in human affairs. Tragic takes into account the problems each person must face when trying to integrate and maintain psychic equilibrium amidst a
potentially overwhelming variety of internal needs and demands and unpredictable
changes of external circumstance, both favorable and unfavorable.
(p. xiv)

Schafer points out that tragic knots involve clashes of values. His inclusive
reality principle is brought clinically alive by organizing his discussion
around three inevitable life experiences that illustrate Freuds final conception of the reality principle as an inclusive analytic attitude toward the
unavoidable and seemingly insoluble dilemmas of life (p. 5). The three
seemingly insoluble dilemmas he chooses are (1) coping with having been
victimized, (2) approaching intimacy with others, and (3) maintaining privacy. The sense of clinical immediacy is organized around the here and now
of typical transference and countertransference dilemmas, and Schafer continually stresses how individualized and varied any individual solutions must
be through all the stages of analysis and the special challenges of termination. The investigation of these dilemmas serves to remind the reader of the
dignity and profundity of the psychoanalytic vision of human nature, and of
the difficulties and rewards of striving for an analytic stance.

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In Talking to the Unconscious: Attunement to Unconscious Thought,

Schafer organizes his subject around five modes of unconscious thought in
the analytic process explaining how, in light of these modes, interpretation
functions in the clinical dialogue. These five modes are concreteness, fluid
boundaries, timelessness, connectedness to others, and tolerance of contradiction. He also discusses the inevitable alienating effect of interpretation.
These classically rooted qualities were originally what defined the (intrapsychic) unconscious. Here, however, these same qualities are expanded into an
experience-near clinical theory rooted as well in interpersonal and intersubjective aspects of the analytic dialogue. For example, the fluid boundaries
are between self and other, and the struggles exist within each subject as
well as intersubjectively in the analytic dyad. Schafer uses the superego (an
intrapsychic structure), family dramas (significant early memories), and the
transferencecountertransference (here and now analytic interaction) as
examples locations where condensations and displacements, introjective
and projective processes, and the like make it a clinical necessity always to
leave the question open of who is who and who is doing what to whom in
any clinical moment.
While discussing timelessness (p. 258) Schafer stresses unconscious
immediacy, and how in clinical work we must always start from this crucial
immediacy which is an essential ingredient in clinical aliveness. Without it,
how could one be attuned to unconscious processes? In the section on connectedness, he gives a wonderful example of clinical art and wisdom by constructing a long list of disconnecting attitudes and experiences and asking
the reader what they have in common. He answers that they are all modes
of relating, pointing out that countertransference awareness can help maintain the crucial clinical stance not of thinking about whether or not the
patient is related, but rather asking how the patient is relating, period. Connectedness, he insists, is not merely a matter of togetherness, but relies on
both the immediacy of the unconscious in both participants and on its
direct expression in plain spoken words. The chapter is full of such experience-near technical guidelines. In discussing tolerance of contradiction, he
counsels patience. One must be fully present to various sides or voices or
selves, rather than prematurely taking sides with the theoretically or subjectively more advanced self or against the side that defends against the
good.
In Conflict: Conceptualization, Practice, Problems, Schafer continues the
general emphasis on agency, action, immediacy, and depth. Depth psychology refers to intrapsychic life and unconscious processes, but to the extent
that it is real, the intensities that matter are played out in the immediacy of
the transferencecountertransference field, and the existential dilemmas are
interpersonal and intersubjective. Relatively brief but effective clinical examples demonstrate the limits of simple impulsedefense formulas when contextualizing conflictual tragic knots in meaningful clinical work. Here is one
example:
As an organizing concept, intrapsychic conflict is best approached as a center of
distress, a hub into which, or through which, many of the analysands tendencies

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pass. As such, it is not defined in a way that facilitates clear-cut accounts of compromise, for what is compromise in one contributory context may be triumph in
another and surrender in a third. Complex and full of contradictions says it better
than conflict does. In the psychoanalytic vision of reality, life is like that.
(p. 412)

A part of the project in this new text seems to be Schafers emphatic disavowal of any ideas others may have had that he is not a traditional analyst
on the basis of his writing on action language and narration. His synthesis
of contemporary Freudian and Kleinian models rests in Freudian foundations, he says, and his key terms action and narration and their correlates
better describe traditional analysts practices give a clearer and experientially richer account [of traditional analysis] and the changes that it brings
about (p. 47). To think of psychic agencies when speaking of meaningful
human experiences tends to collude with the universal tendency to disavow
agency and responsibility. Kleinian theory brings object relations to the fore,
as well as a sustained focus in the analytic process on the here and now of
unconscious fantasy and its impact and aliveness in the transferencecountertransference.
In Part II, The internal world of conflict and phantasy, the Kleinian influence is more prominent. The additional existential issues that Schafer said
he would take up in the preface also take on a decidedly Kleinian cast here.
Another broad trend is an exploration of Schafers contributions to the evolution of contemporary Kleinian thought. Where envy and object hate have
often predominated, here caring, gratitude, benevolence, and forgiveness are
more deeply explored. In addition, the Kleinians get their share of Schafers
challenge to theoretical traditions. For example, he critiques the tendency in
Kleinian thought to collapse all aggressive trends into the concept of envy.
The Kleinian influence on these chapters is reflected even in their titles, such
as: Caring and Coercive Aspects of the Psychoanalytic Situation, The
Countertransference of Feeling Frustrated, Gratitude and Benevolence.
Examples abound of how theory may support or hinder clinical work,
and of the complexity of the analysts task. The paper on Cordelia and Lear
is an especially fine example of the use of psychoanalytic ideas to illuminate
literature, art and the human sciences. Schafer elucidates Cordelias tragic
knots, and demonstrates that we cannot take her ultimate apparent forgiveness of Lear at face value, just as we should not automatically accept such
things as gratitude, caring and benevolence at face value in our clinical
work. He proposes that the plays title might more accurately reflect its
action if its title were The Tragedies of King Lear and Cordelia. He asks the
reader: Two tragedies, two deaths? (p. 134).
While reading these papers, I continually heard echoes of Schafers earlier
work (he points out many of these himself). I also savored Schafers unique
voice, which has grown but never wavered in its essential qualities over the
years qualities such as dignity, erudition, intimacy and reach. With this
book, he deepens and unifies his life work of creating a coherent and integrated theory built upon his Freudian foundations and subsequent interests
and influences, but also grounded in his personal experience, hard- won conCopyright 2012 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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Book Reviews

victions, and talent for finding the precise words he needs to express them.
On the basis of such considerations, I came to see, in this reading of Schafer, that perhaps I admire most his intellectual and psychoanalytic integrity.
That integrity embraces both his intense loyalty to those thinkers who were
most influential and facilitative of his analytic development and a ferocity
one senses in his insistence that he could only go where his heart and mind
led him, and that his deepest need was to find out what was meaningful and
true for himself.
Gerald I. Fogel
2455 Marshall Street, Suite 5, Portland, OR 97210, USA
e-mail: geraldfogel@comcast.net

Libres Cahiers pour la Psychanalyse No. 21, Printemps 2010: Langoisse

[No. 21, Spring 2010: Anxiety]1
Editions in Press, Paris, 2010; 170 pp; 20

For their 21st issue, the Libres Cahiers pour la Psychanalyse propose a
rereading of the 32nd lecture in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis series (Freud, 1933a, 193236; Strachey, 1964). Written during the
summer of 1932 with the aim of boosting the Verlags finances, these lectures are addressed primarily to a wide, cultivated readership with an interest in psychoanalysis. They are also an opportunity for Freud to announce
how his thinking has progressed, and to return to various points of discussion while prolonging his reflection on certain established concepts. A Foreword written by the editorial committee provides a synopsis of the lecture
that is the focus of interest here and has spurred the thinking of 11 contributors.
In the opening text Daniel Wildlcher considers the origins of the question. The Language of Anxiety, a chapter from his book, Metapsychology
of Meaning (Wildlcher, 1986), considers the different stages of elucidation
of this particular state of affect and draws our attention to the maintenance of a paradox amidst the oscillations of Freudian thought: how can
anxiety be at once defined as a traumatic experience and as the very signal
of that experience? Melanie Klein tried to reply to this question, referring
to the Freudian model of a danger signal perceived by the primary ego as
belonging to the sphere of the death drive; here, she returns to the theory of
trauma as conceptualized by Laplanche (1970, 1980), who sees the stamp
of the death drive in the demands of the drives in the raw (Wildlocher,
1986, p. 26). Distinguishing fear from anxiety and inverting the Freudian
model, Laplanche positions anxiety in the external and primary trauma of
maternal seduction. Faced with these contradictions, the author suggests
that the essential reason for them is that these theories do not all address
the same object (p. 27). In a gesture to the notion of programming, he constructs an overview describing the sequence of operations which contribute
1

Translated by Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio Ph.D.

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